MMO Report Tips World Of Warcraft As Leader

Thanks to VE3D for reprinting details of a new online gaming report discussing MMO trends and estimated game popularity. According to the excerpts from the Themis Group's report, online gaming will grow from $960 million revenues in 2003 to $4.10 billion in 2008, and the chart estimating "expected popularity of new persistent worlds... in descending order by projected subscriber base twelve months after launch" is headed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft, followed by Sony's EverQuest 2 and Turbine's Middle Earth Online. The report also suggests: "Success with a license challenges developers to find a way to implement the license's core appeal into an MMG-style game - a challenge which Final Fantasy Online met, but Star Wars Galaxies did not."

Comments

Re:Powerleveling

[decapentaplegic]

it'll be dominated with folks that just spend more money being the more powerful people in the game.

This didn't seem to hurt Wizards of the Coast's "Magic: The Gathering". When I was playing a lot five years ago, that game was entirely dominated by people who could aford to buy the powerful rare cards. None the less it was the most popular game around, in both the hard core and casual circles.

Metaverses

[jafuser]

MMO gamess are fun for a while, but I think after you've seen 2 or 3 of them, you realize that the difference between them isn't really all that remarkable. They all have the same general framework of doing mundane tasks to increase virtual rank.

I think the next big online phenomenon is going to be metaverses.

In a metaverse, you are not given a bunch of artificial skills and abilities. You (the person behind the keyboard) are the determining factor of your online persona's skill. And it's not a twitchy kind of skill either, it's pure creativity.

The first time I logged into a network and was able to communicate with other people around the world in real time, I knew it was going to eventually catch on and spread to the point of being mainstream phenomenon.

Now I'm getting the same feeling now, as I've jumped into the "metaverse" environemnt known as Second Life. I've played a handful of MMORPGs before Second Life, and got the impression from them that all online environments would have basically the same general template.

My first day within SL was like my first time on the internet, I was overwhelmed that so much creative flexibility could be organized in a real time multiperson environement. It's sort of a feeling like walking down a very long narrow confining hallway which suddenly opens up to a wide open outdoor field.

The metaverse-like applications we have currently are nowhere near the sophistication of those dipicted in science fiction, but to be fair, we're just getting started. Before too long, I predict that they are going to be as mainstream as the internet is now.

I think MMO games are nearing their limit for flexibility. The only direction to go from here is to open up the virtual world that make up these games and let your users truly create the content. Of course, when that happens, it's hard to stay confined to a theme or license, so it seems inevitable that metaverses will be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder.